Salman Toor's Sensual Apprehension of Life

Salman Toor, Bedroom Boy (2019)

I first encountered the sensual art of Salman Toor last July as a result of reading Johanna Fateman’s excellent “Goings On About Town” note on Toor’s “How Will I Know” show at the Whitney. Fateman says of his wonderful Bedroom Boy, it “reimagines the trope of the reclining nude as a slender, hirsute young man snapping a come-hither selfie.” I like that. I found Bedroom Boy at Toor’s website. It is beguiling. 

Recently, another absorbing review of Toor’s work appeared – Sanford Schwartz’s “Young and in Love” (The New York Review of Books, April 8, 2021). Schwartz writes,

Whether he is showing blue jeans, a martini glass, or a person’s hair, Toor makes it seem as if he has brushed it in just a moment before. If he wants to show light descending from a lamp, he paints it in so many white, vertical, parallel strokes. If our sleeping nude has hairy legs, black flecks here and there will suffice. Every aspect of a given picture seems to breathe a little. 

That “If our sleeping nude has hairy legs, black flecks here and there will suffice” is delightful.